


Fool's Gold

by Bearfacedcheek



Series: Revenge, served hot and cold [1]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:33:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23640124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bearfacedcheek/pseuds/Bearfacedcheek
Summary: In his mind he’s already written that Veronica’s kisses will taste like ashes. Like the ruined remains of his once burning love for Betty or the smouldering of his impotent rage against Archie.
Relationships: Archie Andrews/Betty Cooper, Jughead Jones/Veronica Lodge
Series: Revenge, served hot and cold [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1706734
Comments: 10
Kudos: 83





	Fool's Gold

**Author's Note:**

> So I have seen stuff, which if believed means that we are going to see these two very sad soon. I don't like it but in the unlikely event it leads to Jeronica revenge f*#king all over Riverdale then i could get behind it.
> 
> The show won't do it though so i've written it myself.
> 
> /* Spoilers for 4x17, probably */

In his mind Jughead is always writing. Always turning phrases around real life. Colouring in his shabby early years, making sense on his frankly terrifying teens. Even now he weaves prose around his broken heart, coining phrases of sorrow, regret, and dark simmering rage.

In his mind he’s already written that Veronica’s kisses will taste like ashes. Like the ruined remains of his once burning love for Betty or the smouldering of his impotent rage against Archie.

Her tongue slips into his mouth and she tastes of sweet maple rum and lip gloss and for a short blissful time he stops writing, stops thinking, and just loses himself in the mindless disconsolate perfection of fucking her. Damn she’s a great fuck.

She’d seen them, Betty and Archie. She’d arrived late for rehearsals in time to watch them sing together and, if her bitter recount was to believed, suck face like they were trying to lick each other’s tonsils. Nice image Veronica, thanks for that.

So, she’d comes to him, shared their secret and her misery and poured just a little rum, just enough to lubricate his slide into nihilistic, broken hearted, apathy. Just enough, that when she talked about revenge, he found himself shrugging and reaching to push her uncharacteristically limp hair from her face.

“Yeah,” his own voice had sounded hoarse with pain and bitterness. “Fuck them.”

Or rather fuck her. Jesus Christ what the hell is she doing with her pussy? He wonder’s briefly if she can do any of those ping pong ball trick, she certainly seems to have the muscles. Then she clamps around him and bites his shoulder and he stops thinking altogether.

They do it, hard and angry, on the sofa of the house he shares with Betty. Then, because he’s feeling justifiably spiteful, he leads her up to his bedroom, the one he shares with her best friend, and lays her down on the ridiculously poofy bed. Veronica rubs herself over the sheets like a cat scenting her territory. Its sexy and nasty and he finds himself more than hard enough to go at her again.

Betty’s smell and a thousand tainted memories surround him as he pushes carelessly into Veronica’s greedy pussy. There’s a cracking in his chest so sharp he’s surprised it can’t be heard from the outside. Betty lied, she told him over and over that she loved him, that he was the one. That his fears over Archie were unfounded. She actually made him believe that his insecurities were paranoid, crazy, unfair. Christ, he’d even felt guilty about doubting her.

What a fucking fool.

“Put it on me Jughead,” Veronica whispers into his damp hair and he realises that he’s crying, fucking bawling into her soft scented neck as he ruts artlessly into her. “I can take it. put it all on me.”

She cards her fingers through his hair and opens her legs wider, welcoming his rough boorish thrusts. “I’ve got you,” she tells him and he sobs and thrusts into her harder, as if he can fuck the anguish out of his heart and pour it into her gluttonous cunt to be devoured and destroyed.

“Veronica,” he chokes her name and grabs her hips so he can go deeper, his rhythm choppy and broken as he fucks her.

“I know,” she’s awkwardly laying kisses on his temples and stroking his hair. “I can take it Jug, don’t hold back, put it on me.”

He snarls at that. Takes her at her word, _she_ after all he has never had any reason to doubt, and picks up the pace. Snapping his hips into her hard and soaking her with tears and cum as he finishes with a series of sloppy thrusts and a whimper of her name into her skin.

She holds him to her naked chest and strokes his hair while he pulls himself together.

“Guess that levels the playing field,” he says eventually, despair settling back into the space she leaves behind as she pulls away. “Something to hit back with when we confront them.”

Her eyes, cat like and calculating, find his as they pull apart and rise form the bed. “Or,” she pauses and looks at him like she’s deciding if he’s worth hiring. “We could serve this dish ice cold.”

……………………………………………………

Her plan is diabolically cruel, bloodthirsty thing she is. So much more cunning than he could have imagined. He’d grinned, sly and snakelike, when she’d told him. “Yes,” he’d fancied his voice hisses across the s. “Let’s fucking do it.”

“You sure you can pull it off Jughead?”

“Of course,” he’d snapped, though she’d been right to question if he could keep his notorious temper in check, and his snide comments contained long enough.

Actually, he thinks as he, as he wraps his arm around Betty and suggests genially that they knock for Archie, it’s actually a pretty cathartic way to deal with cheaters.

Betty tries to make an excuse. He can feel the tension in her shoulders and see the anguish under the surface of her eyes. He smiles, sweet and clueless. “Come on Betts, I think V’s gonna be there.”

Veronica is a peerless actress. She’s dotting looks and affectionate touches with Archie and BFF bonhomie with Betty. He apes her style. Lays a tender kiss on Betty’s temple, slaps Archie’s back and teases him gently. Smiles and laughs and plays the part while inside he writes bitter monologues on betrayal and getting fucking even.

They drag it out for weeks, playing the loving oblivious partners and watching the guilt consuming the others. It makes him feel less helpless, less foolish, less like he’s wearing an invisible set of cuckold’s horns.

And they fuck. They meet in secret late at night to crow over their daily victories and screw half dresses against the furniture of the Bon Nuit. They stock an arsenal of digital weaponry for the final showdown. He films her sucking him off, complete with a running commentary of how amazing she is. “Fuck Veronica you have the most incredible mouth, you love sucking cock don’t you, Christ that’s good. Good girl” she hums like a porn star and he calls her a “perfect little whore” and shoots jizz all over her face while she locks eyes with the view finder and licks her lips.

She props the camera against the bar and strips naked to ride him on the hardwood floor squealing and praising his cock the whole time. It’s theatrics yes, especially when they coin phrases of comparison specifically designed to hurt their lovers, but it isn’t entirely make-believe.

He’s impatient for her each day, when he slips into the club long after closing while Betty and Archie sleep, he can tell she’s impatient for him. The words that spill from his mouth as they screw, camera rolling or not, he finds are less and less contrived, more and more honest. “God, V, you’re amazing, shit don’t stop baby”, he calls her that now, ”please, don’t stop.”

Her guile delights him with the ingenious ways she finds to innocently torture their betrayers. “We’re making and effort,” she pats Jughead’s leg condescendingly and he rolls his eyes. “We may never be besties like you two, but we can learn to get along. Since,” she beams at a brittle smiled Betty. “You guys are the actual definition of endgame and we,” she turns loving eyes on Archie. “Have every intention of going the distance, don’t we Archikins?”

The brief agonized look Betty and Archie had shared while he and Veronica pretended to bicker good naturedly had felt like throwing a knockout punch.

He has his own subtle cruelties he regales Veronica with later. The way he’d taken Betty to bed, made her come hard and helpless then feigned inability to follow her. “Betts, it was fine, just one of those things,” he kisses her tenderly. “Honestly babe you didn’t do anything wrong, it was nice”

Veronica throws back her head and laughs. “Ouch, well played Jones, Archie will definitely be suffering an ‘it was nice’ soon.”

The thought of Archie getting even a spite filled fuck from her makes his jaw tick. Not that he’d admit it to her. She has no such reservations, she crawls close to him. “I hate that you have to fuck her, she doesn’t deserve this,” she squeezes him through his jeans for emphasis. “Put it to better use Jughead.”

He does just that with her bent over the bar telling him to fill her up. “Give me that cum Jug, she doesn’t deserve it, give it all to me.”

“When you screw him,” he’d tugged her head back by her hair to snarl in her ear. “Do you think of me?”

“No,” she pushes him back enough that she can pull off him and turn in his arms. “No, when I’m with you I,” her expression flickers and she changes her mind. “Hell no, I might end up enjoying myself with him, which frankly nauseates me.”

“Now,” she continues as she wriggles so she can impale herself on him shaft again. “Feel like giving me what he can’t.”

They start talking about summer and beyond and Archie and Betty finally break. It’s obvious that the break ups are coming but he just smiles adoringly and agrees to meet at Pop’s a little engineering from Veronica and she manages to steer Archie to the same location.

They sit side by side in the same booth surprising Betty when she arrives a little early and confusing Archie a few minutes later. “Oh Elizabeth,” Veronica’s amiable veneer falls away. “I’m sure you can both say what you have to say right here. I mean it involves you both doesn’t it?”

“You knew?” Betty’s eyes are wide and filling with questions as they swivel to Jughead’s stony expression. “Jug?”

“Oh, yeah,” he nods, a slight scoff in his tone. “We knew.”

“I saw you,” Veronica chips in looking like an ice sculpture. “Playing tonsil hockey at rehearsals.”

“Ronnie,” Archie had tried. “Let me explain.”

“No let me explain Archibald,” she’d spat her cool demeanour heating fast into burning fury.

“You cheated on me with my _best_ friend and you,” a disgusted glance at Betty. “Cheated on your boyfriend with his best friend. Actually, not much explanation required,” she’d straightened looking tiny and fierce and just incredible. “You are an irredeemable man whore and you,” she’d turned fully on Betty. “Are a lying manipulative bitch.”

They’d talked about how they’d reveal themselves. Maybe a little montage of their videos, maybe just straight out telling them they’d been fucking and it had been mind blowing. In reality, Veronica turns to him with watering eyes and getting even doesn’t feel that important, _they_ don’t feel as important as the teary eyed girl beside him.

The videos, the moments they’ve shared are theirs alone, he finds he doesn’t want to share. He finds he doesn’t care to hear their explanations or see the hurt on their faces at having been played, taunted and cheated on for weeks. What he cares about is Veronica.

“They’re not worth it,” he whispers and she nods. Not worth their anger, not worth the time they’d waste hearing their apologies or even worth their spite filled vengeance. Not worth a single tear on Veronica’s cheek.

Veronica picks up the flash drive of home sex tapes and tells him what he already thinks. “These are just for us. Let’s go”

They go and she doesn’t cry. She leans into his side and he wraps an arm around her, grateful to have her there, needing him and supporting him in equal measure.

“We’ll be ok Jughead,” she tells him.

His heart is a torn and bloody mess barely beating in his chest, his abandonment issues have mainlined a shot of steroids and right now he feels like he’ll never trust another human being again. But inexplicably, illogically, maybe miraculously, with her body tucked against his and his past loves planted firmly in his rear-view mirror, he thinks she might be right.

That she is always right is something he learns over the sweet domestic years between that moment and their ten-year high school reunion, where he finds he’s actually having a good time. She was right they should come and see Riverdale and all their old classmates again.

She’s got a lower management job she hates in a PR firm and he’s got a novel published that sold a grand total of three hundred and fifty copies and now writes for an online magazine for a pittance. Reggie flashes his Rolex and Ethel, pushing a size 2 now and looking harder round the edges than he could have imagined possible, tells them about her job as a lawyer in New York. They smile and lean into one another, they have no tales of wealth or success, they need none. She has a thin gold band around her finger and he has an ornate V painted on the skin over his ribs, what they have they don’t need to brag about.

Betty and Archie are there, not as Betty _and_ Archie, that ship floundered undramatically before either made it to University. It doesn’t hurt seeing them, he’s not even angry, how could he be when contentment has settles so deeply in to the marrow of his bones.

He makes the first move, walks over to Archie and holds out his hand. “How’ve you been?”

Archie has, to no one’s great surprise, a divorce under his belt already and Betty has a flourishing career and a pleasant if unremarkable boyfriend. Veronica smiles warmly when the blonde asks them how things are with them. “Oh, not too terrible, considering what I have to put up with” she says and he can hear the depth of affection in her light teasing tone as she throws a playful smirk his way. “Wine helps.”

They share that private joke through the connection of their eyes. The Friday nights she hits the couch hard and throws back her head calling out. “Husband, wine me now” and he pours her middling price Cabernet Franc, the most expensive thing in the weekly shop, calls her a lush and kisses her forehead.

Betty smiles a little stiffly. “I’m glad,” she says. “And I’m sorry about everything.”

“Betty,” he starts dreading this conversation, not because of lingering emotion but just because it feels like so much effort when they’re there to have fun. “It was a long time ago. Sure, it hurt back then, the betrayal bu-“

“Jug don’t be so dramatic,” Veronica huffs, giving him a light scolding slap on the arm. “What he’s trying to say is don’t sweat it B. Seriously things could literally not have worked out better.”

He frowns at her interruption and she rolls her eyes and, short as she is even in her heels, stands on her tip toes to tug him down for a cursory peck on the cheek.

He feels warm and magnanimous in the glow of Veronica’s perpetually irritated affection and laughs lightly. “Yeah what she said, don’t sweat it. It’s great to see you both again, really.”

They even go so far as to make the sort of vague plans you do with long lost friends. “We should catch up, if you’re in the city”

They may even honour them, they went through a lot with these people after all, he grew up with them. And besides the very worst thing they ever did to them brought them to the very best thing that’s ever happened to either of them.

They will or they won’t it doesn’t really matter to him. What matters is the five foot one of Latina firecracker who transitioned from thorn his side, to accomplice, to best friend (with extremely beneficial benefits), to loving, if bossy, wife.

She gets a little drunk and falls asleep on his shoulder in the taxi. Yes, he thinks as she drools lightly on his shoulder, he’ll let her lead on seeing their old friends again or not because all that really matters to him now is Veronica

He was a fool once, now he has her. Does that make her fool's gold? She'd hate it but he thinks it fits. Beautiful, surprising, and with no price tag other than taking the time to search it out. Yes that fits her, his treasure, his beautiful fool's gold.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes I know I know, I almost have the next chapter of Long way round to heaven written I'm just struggling to finish it. The file keeps showing the phrase 'opened 8 hours ago' but rarely 'edited 8 hours ago' 
> 
> I'll try harder.
> 
> I also have a J/B/A fic in the works that might feel too miserable to post if B/A make Jughead cry. Oh god he's going to cry isn't he? Not sure i can cope


End file.
